


Pretense

by Celia_and



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Angst, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Casual Sex, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Fuckbuddies, My First Fanfic, Rey Needs A Hug, Roommates, Smut, They both need therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:02:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22033738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celia_and/pseuds/Celia_and
Summary: They have it down to a science. No skin, no feelings. It’s unbearable, but not enough to stop.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 193
Kudos: 1365





	1. Rules

He can tell she’s happiest when he’s pistoning into her hard and fast. Whenever he slows, she lets out an annoyed grunt and grasps behind her to whatever body part she can reach to urge him faster. Slow is too much like care, too much like intimacy, too much like all the things that aren’t allowed. So he digs his fingers into her hips until it must hurt and picks up the pace.

This is how it’s supposed to be: her using him and him using her. All taking, no giving.

* * *

She works so much. Between school and her internship and waitressing, some days she comes home too tired to talk. Her workload is impossible, but she needs to do it, so she does. ( _You don’t need to,_ he thinks. _I could take care of you._ He wants to sit her on the couch and pile every blanket in their apartment on her and feed her grilled cheese and soup and strawberries until she can’t move and forgets to think and can’t do anything but sleep for two days until she’s rested, _really_ rested.) Ben should know better than to take it personally, those silent nights, but he doesn’t. When she goes a few days in a row without instigating an evening chat, his mind devises new worst cases. _She can’t stand him, can’t put up with having him as a roommate anymore, and he’s always hanging around, her pathetic shadow. When she does talk to him it’s out of pity, or to make just enough of an effort to retain access to his dick. He’s too much, too intense, why would she want him around, why would any woman, when even his own mother didn’t._

Sometimes, to break an unbearable silence, he’ll pick a fight with her. About the sink full of her dirty dishes, or how she never takes out the trash, even when it gets too full and cinching the bag makes the trash spill out the top like toothpaste. (He doesn’t care about the dishes, or the trash—he’d gladly wash her dishes and empty her trash forever if it meant she’d deign to keep him around.) The yelling is better than the silence. At least she cares enough to yell back.

* * *

There’s never foreplay. When she wants sex, she just grabs a fistful of his shirt and pulls, in a silent peremptory instruction. She takes it for granted that he’ll be up for sex whenever she is, and with good reason—he’s never refused her. She always unceremoniously sheds her pants and panties but leaves her shirt on, and he takes off just his shirt. She made that an unspoken rule early on—to minimize skin on skin, they’re a checkerboard of nudity. She pushes his hands down when he forgets mid-thrust and starts to slide them up from her hips, inching under the hem of her shirt. She huffs impatiently when his undone pants have the audacity to slide down as he fucks her standing. Gravity is his fault.

Because she won’t let him prepare her, she isn’t always wet enough when he enters her. He invariably freezes when he nudges her too-dry entrance, but she insists on guiding him inside. There’s something about the pinch, the painful friction, that he thinks she thinks she deserves. He knows her well enough to know that she mistrusts anything too good: life has taught her that there’s always a catch. Even when she takes her orgasms from him, she doesn’t want to enjoy it too much. He could tell her she’s wrong, that she deserves every single good thing in the world. But that’s probably against a rule. And she wouldn’t believe him anyway.

* * *

She’s been sexually uninhibited as long as they’ve lived together. She’s had guys back to the apartment, which was a special kind of torture. Their bedrooms share a wall thick enough to muffle speech but thin enough to let louder noises through.

She doesn’t drink, but when she gets really tired it’s like she’s drunk. One night they stay up until 4 a.m. and she tells him that hooking up with strangers is a gamble with three possible outcomes: you come, you don’t come, or you get murdered. She makes a tipsy little half-chuckle, like it’s a kind-of funny joke, and he sees red. _Don’t fucking joke about that,_ he thinks, but can’t find the words to say. _Don’t treat your life so cheaply._

She doesn’t think her life is worth much, he knows—it’s a side effect of having your parents abandon you in a parking lot. The first time he’s inside her, the first thing he thinks is how indescribably _right_ it is. His second thought is, _if I make it good enough, maybe she won’t be murdered._

* * *

She rarely lets him fuck her face to face. She prefers to ride him, facing away so he can see the bounce of her ass as it slaps his pelvis. Or to have him take her from behind, standing as she braces herself on the kitchen counter or the hallway doorframe. He thinks she likes this best of all: to be able to imagine that he isn’t a person with a brain and a heart, just a disembodied cock and two hands gripping her hips. When he can’t take it anymore, he snakes his arm around her middle and folds at the waist so his chest presses against her back, his lips ghosting over the nape of her neck in a pale imitation of what’s forbidden him. She digs her fingernails into his forearm when he does, and he doesn’t know if it’s to punish him or to keep him there. He never lasts long after that, his hips stuttering as he fills the condom she clenches. She pulls away right after, slipping out of his arms to the bathroom and shutting the door with an unyielding _click_.

They have it down to a science. No skin, no feelings. It’s unbearable, but not enough to stop.

* * *

Ben thinks back to an intro psych class he took in college and to the rats trained by scientists to press a lever to get treats. He vaguely remembers the different types of conditioning: one treat dispensed at set time intervals, or after a fixed or variable number of lever presses. He also remembers a similar experimental setup with electric shocks, not treats. He can’t remember whether they were ever combined—did pressing the lever ever alternate between resulting in a treat or an electric shock? And if it did, was the prospect of a treat tempting enough for the rat to brave the shock?

Those scientists might be interested in studying him, he thinks. He gets the treat _and_ the shock every time. And he can’t stop pressing the lever.

* * *

Sometimes he pretends. Sometimes she lets him.

One time in a dozen or so, she permits him to maneuver her so they’re face to face: her on her back, or propped up against the wall, or riding him. She smiles grimly as she lets him position her, like there’s an inside joke he doesn’t get, until a thrust contorts her mouth to a gasp.

She never looks straight in his eyes when he’s inside her. Sometimes she looks at his temple, or his jaw, or over his head at the wall. More often she closes her eyes, and he has free rein to drink her in—her freckles and her fluttering eyelashes and her parted lips and the little wrinkle between her eyebrows. It’s almost impossible, then, to keep from closing the gap between his mouth and her. But instead he buries his face in the crook of her neck and pretends.

* * *

He always knows when she gets home, because she’s so loud. He doesn’t understand how one slender person can make as much noise as a sumo wrestling team shutting the front door, kicking her shoes off, and dropping her coat and her bags (seriously, are there _bricks_ in there?). She always calls “Ben?” as she’s shedding her burdens, to see if he’s home. He almost always is. With the hours she works, it’s rare that she returns before he gets home from the gym. “Here,” he always responds, like she’s calling roll.

She heads straight to the kitchen to rummage through the fridge for anything edible, and he meanders out a few minutes later, as if it just occurred to him that he could eat too. He can tell straight off whether she’s in the mood to talk or not. When she is, he stands around, awkwardly leaning against the nearest wall or piece of furniture, unless she tells him to sit down. Waiting for an invitation, as if it isn’t his apartment just as much as it hers.

She blows hot and cold. She’s sensitive, though she would hate to be described that way. Not in a bad way—she responds strongly to both positives and negatives, so praise from a professor can make her day, or a dig from a customer infuriate her. She tells him one day she’s not a waitress—she just plays one at work. After ten months in the role she has her lines and her choreography and the requisite facial expressions down pat. Ben is terrible at remembering names, so Rey uses an established descriptor for each coworker when telling him about them: pink hair Grace, drama Charlie, cool manager Carol Anne, asshole manager Bob.

Ben soaks up every drop of her life she’s willing to share with him. She asks about his day, too, but he tells only the basics. His life isn’t interesting and dynamic the way hers is, and besides, he lacks her knack of making a scene come alive with words.

Sometimes she fucks him afterwards, sometimes not. He almost prefers it when she doesn’t—it’s easier to make believe that it means something.

* * *

There are only two official rules; the rest have built up silently over time.

That first time she grabbed his shirt and tugged, arching a seductive eyebrow that asked _you in?_ and threading her fingers through his hair, his brain stopped for a second. Then it supplied a warning alarm: _This is a trap._ He stood stock-still, as if by freezing he could melt into the floorboards and escape from this, the cruelest of all pranks. But then she breathed his name, just _Ben,_ and he melted into her instead, gathering her into his arms and seeking her mouth with his. She turned her head at the last second, so his lips landed on her cheek, and he thought ruefully, _It was a trick after all._ But she grasped his head and turned it to look in his eyes and said, “No, I want you to fuck me. But no kissing.” He could do nothing but nod. An easy concession. A man who’s offered half of paradise shouldn’t ask for the other half.

A minute later, after she’d pushed him onto the sofa and straddled him and rolled a condom down his throbbing cock, she added another thing with a smirk. Like a joke, like a parody of a couple in a romantic comedy where friends-with-benefits situations never work because they inevitably catch _feelings_ , and how _ridiculous_ is that? “Don’t fall in love with me, Ben.” As she slowly took him inside, inch by inch, it took everything he had not to reply.

_Too late._


	2. Broken

The kitchen is small, and Ben takes up a lot of space. For the first few months, they were forever bumping into each other, and Ben would apologize every time, even when it was her fault. Rey was surprised when they learned to predict each other’s movements, to the point that she can be cooking while he empties the dishwasher or puts groceries away in an apparently smoothly choreographed dance. A shift of his shoulders out of the corner of her eye tells Rey which way he’ll go next, and he’s attuned to her every move.

She tells herself she shouldn’t have been surprised how quickly he learned her body in other ways, but she was. She’d never had the luxury of multiple orgasms—before him, she was lucky to eke out one. He somehow intuits when to speed up or slow down, to change the angle or the depth of his thrusts so she comes and comes until she isn’t sure where one climax ends and the next begins. It’s only when she’s melted to rubber in his arms that he lets himself finish.

Sometimes she thinks he gasps her name as he comes. But she’s probably mishearing.

* * *

Ever since she stole a backpack from Walmart when she was 16, she’d always kept a go bag packed and ready. For a while it held everything she owned: a secondhand sweater, two ratty tee shirts, ripped jeans, some underwear, a hairbrush with missing bristles, and whatever cash she could scrounge. It was a step up from the trash bags of foster care but served the same purpose.

That bag accompanied her from the vacant property where she’d squatted when she ran away from her last foster placement to the rental basement she shared with five other girls—one of whom stole $450 Rey had spent six months saving—to Ben’s apartment. _(The apartment she shares with Ben,_ she reminds herself—just because he was living there first doesn’t make it less hers. Maybe if she tells herself often enough she’ll believe it.)

Then one day, about eight months after she’d moved in with Ben, she’d needed a backpack to carry some books home from her internship and had unpacked the bag. She left its contents in a neat pile on the floor next to her closet, intending to repack it as soon as she was finished carrying the books. But one thing came up and then another, and she’d never gotten around to repacking. She tried not to think too much about why.

* * *

She doesn’t know if he even realizes he does it. Every time she initiates sex, after the removal of the permissible clothing, there’s a silent question of what position she wants. As they maneuver, he lightly takes hold of her waist to try to keep her facing him—gently enough that she can easily turn around, and she usually does. Every time, there’s a look in his eyes that passes too quickly for her to decipher, but she could almost mistake it for hope.

Facing him during sex is dangerous, for reasons she doesn’t let herself consider. But sometimes she’s weak, and sometimes she doesn’t turn away. Sometimes his chest brushes her nipples through her shirt, and her hands move over his biceps in what is too much like a caress. Sometimes her fingers scrabble at his bare shoulders for purchase as she comes with a wordless cry, and sometimes she breathes the air he breathes as she takes a moment to recover.

After she’s weak enough to fuck him face to face, she sometimes gives him a joking punch on the shoulder and says “good job, sport” or “nice one, champ” or something equally ridiculous, as a sort of punishment. He must not mind, because he always tries again the next time.

* * *

Being with Ben feels too much like _home,_ and _safe,_ and things she’s not allowed to want. When a thunderstorm downs power lines one night, they sit on the window seat (Rey still insists it’s a proper window _seat,_ not _sill,_ despite its depth accommodating approximately 1.2 of Ben’s buttcheeks) to watch the lightning and compete to invent the most ridiculous celebrity baby name. By the time the game dissolves into listing random nouns, Rey is laughing so hard she falls off the ledge. She’s not hurt at all, but Ben is frantically worried that she’s broken something and can’t feel it because of the adrenaline. With tears of laughter still in her eyes, she lets him pull every cushion from the couch onto the floor and gingerly help her onto them. They end up that way, her ensconced on an excessive pile of cushions and him sitting on the wood floor, leaning against the wall. As she starts to drowse off, the storm subsides and she can hear his steady breathing.

 _Home,_ she thinks. _Safe._

* * *

She’s a bad roommate, she knows. Tidiness and order and aesthetics sit at a level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that she’s never reached before, so it doesn’t come naturally to her to delay eating to wash the dishes, or to delay sleep to pick up her dirty clothes. Ben doesn’t understand; he was raised by parents who made sure he put his clothes in the laundry and emptied the dishwasher and did his chores. She thinks it might be too late for her now—there might be some essential piece of her missing or corrupted, and she will never be able to default to seeing a mess and cleaning it. She knows he’ll only put up with her for so long, and she occasionally thinks about repacking that old backpack.

Sometimes, when she’s riding his cock, she clenches her inner walls in just the way she knows will draw an orgasm from him, to try to make him come before she does. She wants him to get more out of this than she does, so maybe he won’t mind so much that she’s broken. Defective as a roommate. But his fingers always find her clit and press _just so_ and she falls over the edge before she can stop herself, forgetting her regret for a moment in the white-hot blaze.

So she can never even the scales. And she knows his tolerance won’t last forever—she has an expiration date, she just doesn’t know when.

* * *

Sometimes she’s surprised by an overwhelming urge to tell him things, things she’s never told anyone before. She confides in him that her parents dropped her off in a parking lot when she was five and didn’t come back. She tells him about the cracks in the asphalt, the places where it had crumbled around the edges. She recalls the sunburn she got that day, in that parking lot, and how her skin blistered and peeled later. She tells him about growing up in foster care, leaving out only the parts that she knows will hurt him the most, though why these things should hurt him particularly to hear she isn’t sure.

She blames her openness with him on how good a listener he is. He actually _listens,_ and asks her questions, and gives her his time. He lets her occupy space in his life. And so she learns to let herself take the time and attention he offers her, and she tells him things.

* * *

She doesn’t remember exactly why she did it the first time. Maybe the prospect of finding a new hookup was exhausting, maybe she was horny and he was there and so big and solid and _male._ She does remember the fear in his eyes when she stopped him from kissing her, and the way his breath hitched and caught when she first took him inside, like breathing would break some spell. She remembers the light circles his thumbs traced on her thighs, before she grabbed his hands and dug them into her waist. She remembers how he brokenly whispered _beautiful_ and _oh_ and _Rey_ before she covered his mouth with her hand and fucked him harder. She remembers all the unspoken rules she made that night, and she never regrets them.

 _Almost_ never.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Change of plans: Rey had more issues than I was expecting and needed her own chapter. So there is now one chapter left to go.
> 
> To everyone who has commented and left kudos and been generally welcoming and wonderful, I can't thank you enough. This fandom and the amazing people in it are an embarrassment of riches.
> 
> To everyone who doesn't have an account and reads but doesn't otherwise interact, I was you up until about a day ago and I want you to know that I so appreciate you and I very sincerely hope you enjoy this story.


	3. Stay

She rarely lets herself cry; it’s a sign of weakness. But sometimes everything just gets to be too much, and she locks herself in her bedroom and pushes a chair up against the door for good measure and buries her face in her pillow so no one can hear her sobs.

* * *

He thinks she thinks he can’t tell when she’s been crying, but the redness of her eyes afterwards gives it away. He is never more tempted to break their rules than then—to wrap her in his arms and kiss her hair and her swollen eyelids and tell her she’s not alone.

* * *

She never instigates sex after crying, until one night she does. She has old, decidedly unattractive sweats on and she hasn’t washed her face but he’s seen worse. They’ve been fucking recreationally for months now, and there’s nothing he’s batted an eyelid at, so she’s almost forgotten what it is to be self-conscious during sex. This is another weakness, reaching for him now, and a gamble. There’s a chance that she might start crying again, but a stronger probability that he can help her forget everything for a little while.

When she grabs at his shirt, he freezes for a second before slowly pulling it off, without his usual alacrity. When she sheds her sweatpants and panties and reaches for his crotch he’s not hard, not even a little bit, and she’s confused more than hurt. And so she breaks the rule about talking after clothes have been removed and says, “Do you not want to?”

* * *

It comes down to this, somehow. Her red eyes make a fundamental difference. He’s fucked her when she’s felt down and when she’s angry and when he wants to just stop and hold her. But her eyes right now are a bridge too far. He can’t fuck her now, not when she’s hurting and he doesn’t know why. So instead he reaches out to cup her cheek in his palm and just says, “Rey.”

She doesn’t draw back, at least—just stands there confused for a minute. She finally puts her palm on his bare chest and it feels so good, so warm, and his traitorous cock stirs. She lightly trails her fingertips down his abdomen and he almost moans. But then she looks back up at him and he sees her eyes all over again and pulls away.

The confusion on her face starts to turn to hurt. “I know I look like a mess, but I’ll turn around and you can pretend. Right, Ben? Please?”

 _No,_ he tries to say, but there’s no air behind it. “No,” he croaks. “I can’t do this. I can’t do _this_ anymore.”

She does recoil now, sharply, as if he’s slapped her. The corner of her lips turn up jerkily and stiffly, like she’s read instructions on how to smile but has never done it before, and says, “Oh. No problem. No hard feelings.”

He doesn’t answer, he can’t, and when she walks away he knows what heartbreak tastes like.

* * *

_Where is the backpack?_ She thought it was in the closet, but it might be under the bed. She tears clothes from their hangers, frantically checking corners where it could be hiding. _Stupid. Should’ve packed it. Should’ve had it ready to go. Get out before it gets too bad, leave before they leave you. Nothing good lasts._

She doesn’t stop, doesn’t take a breath until she’s torn the room apart. She can’t find the backpack, and her hands are shaking. _Leave. Run. Now._

With a physical effort, she takes a deep breath, and then another. She’s kneeling, now, beside the bed in a sea of clothes. She tries to think, to make a rational plan. If she can’t find the backpack, she’ll pack her messenger bag. And her purse. And maybe there’s one of those oversized plastic shopping bags under the kitchen sink where Ben neatly folds and stores plastic shopping bags, or she could just take a trash bag. But she can’t go to the kitchen, not yet, nor to the entryway where she leaves her messenger bag and purse. She’ll have to wait until he’s asleep.

So she breathes, and tries to plan, and waits.

* * *

He wishes someone would tell him what to do. Or that there was an instructional manual he could read: _How Not to Hurt Rey._ He wishes he was a person who knew what to say to make people happy. Being with her tricked him into thinking that he could be. He made her happy sometimes, right? He tried to think of a time, any one time, but his memory only offered up the bad: yelling at her for an unemptied trashcan or a sink of dirty dishes. The look on her face when he rejected her. That gruesome false smile.

It baffles his mind, now, that he ever did those things. It’s not logical. He loves her, so he shouldn’t have hurt her. He should’ve told her he loves her _months_ ago and then over and over and over again until maybe she started to believe it. But instead he pushed her away when she asked for him. If nothing else, he could’ve given her his cock, if that’s what she wanted. And he didn’t even do that one thing.

He wonders if he could physically will himself back in time. The fact that time travel is impossible is irrelevant; no one has ever achieved it before because no one has wanted it as badly as he does. He would change a hundred things, a million things. He sees with the clarity of despair how badly he messed up. But he’ll fix it, he’ll make a plan. He has to. He has nothing to lose except everything.

* * *

She waits until one a.m., an hour after she hears his bedroom door shut. She’s folded the clothes she’s decided to take and they sit in a pile on the bed along with her schoolbooks and laptop. She thinks the messenger bag will hold all the books and computer, if the already-strained seams don’t give way, and the clothes can go in the plastic bag. She decides to wear her boots and carry her sneakers, and maybe a pair of flats so she can look respectable when she needs to. It strikes her now how many things she owns, and how much she will need to leave behind.

As quietly as possible, she opens the bedroom door and looks both ways to check that the coast is clear. The plastic bag will be the loudest, so she’ll save that to the end, until he’s sure to be deeply asleep. She silently pads down the hall and into the living room, which is lit only by a streetlight beam from between the mostly-closed curtains. The strip of light happens to fall on the couch, on the cushion where they fuck when she rides him there, but it isn’t that memory that makes her hesitate.

Seeing the cushion brings her back to that stormy night when he stripped the couch for her. She’s struck by how much he had cared. There’s no one else in her life who would’ve done what he did for her, insignificant as the act of piling cushions on the floor was. There’s no one else in her life who does things for her that they don’t need to do. He didn’t _need_ to make that ridiculous pillow nest, just like he didn’t need to learn every nuance of her body or listen to her tell him things. He _chose_ to.

And then her knees threaten to give way and she has to lean on the dining room table because the realization almost knocks her down: S _he cares enough to want to stay._ She cares enough to ask what she did wrong and try to fix it, if he’ll let her, because this isn’t like foster care and it isn’t like the rest of her life when nothing has been worth fighting for or staying for and it’s always, always better to run. This is _Ben._ And she’s never had a family that she remembers so she thought she didn’t know what it was supposed to feel like, but she knows with sudden and absolute certainty that this is it.

Before she can lose her nerve, she walks back down the hall and knocks on his bedroom door.

* * *

He thinks he might have imagined it at first. He sits hunched over at the edge of his bed, hoping for the answer of what he should do and say to fix everything to magically reveal itself. He thought he’d at least have the rest of the night to try to devise this perfect plan, but it’s definitely a knock, and it’s unmistakably her voice calling, “Ben?”

“Come in,” he rasps as he clicks the nightstand lamp on and stands to meet her.

She enters immediately, and he can tell that there has been some extraordinary change between a few hours ago and now. Her eyes are shining, not with tears, but with a kind of fevered excitement or anxiety. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with her hands, and twists them together until her knuckles are white.

She launches in immediately. “I needed to talk to you, and I’m sorry it’s the middle of the night, and you were probably sleeping, but I just need to say this, and please hear me out, and then you can decide what you want or kick me out or anything, that’s fine, I have my stuff almost ready to go. I know I’m a lot to deal with and I’m a crappy roommate and I don’t clean ever and you do so many things for me that I probably don’t even notice and I’m sorry, but can you please tell me what I should do and maybe I can do better and be better because I care about you and maybe I’m wrong, but I think you might care about me a little sometimes and no one’s ever cared about me and I want to keep living here. If you’ll let me.”

He missed something, he must’ve missed something. His head is spinning. “Wait, you thought I wanted to kick you out of the _apartment_?”

She looks perplexed, and says, “Well, yeah, you said you couldn’t do this anymore, and I thought…”

“Rey…” He doesn’t know what to say first, of all the things he needs to say. “You were crying earlier.”

“So?” she retorts defensively.

“So I didn’t want to…be with you, in that way, when you were upset and I didn’t know why. I was saying I couldn’t keep having sex with you, not that you needed to _leave… Jesus,_ you thought I was fucking _evicting_ you?” How could he have screwed up so much, so badly, when the stakes were so high?

 _Now_ her eyes fill with tears. “Well you didn’t say, and I don’t know how you’ve put up with me this long anyway, and you could find someone else, a much better roommate, and…”

And now he has his own moment of calm clarity, and he realizes that he doesn’t need some perfect plan or instructional guide, he just needs to tell her the truth. “It’s my turn now, okay? Is it okay if you don’t stop me until I say this?”

She nods and lifts her chin, looking like she’s bracing for the worst. A single tear races down her cheek.

He says, “You’re wrong. I don’t think you’re a bad roommate and I would never, ever kick you out of your home and if you ever want to stop living with me, I’ll move out, no questions asked. I’ll help you find a new roommate or I could keep paying half of the rent if you want to live alone, I would just need some time to sell some things, but that’s not the point.” He takes a step toward her. “I don’t care about you a little bit sometimes, I care about you every single minute, all the time, because I love you, Rey, I love you so fucking much and I can’t keep pretending.” Another step. “I can’t keep having sex with you and pretending that you’re not all I think about and that it doesn’t bother me to not be allowed to kiss you because it bothers me, it _kills_ me that I can't show you how I feel about you. And I know I’m an asshole and I should’ve told you this a long time ago, or maybe never because you deserve someone so, _so_ much better than me but anyway. That’s it, that’s what I wanted to say.” And he does a little one-shouldered half-shrug and waits.

* * *

Nothing had ever prepared her for this, she thinks, and the tears flow hot and fast down her cheeks but she doesn’t try to stop them or hide them. Through the haze she reaches out towards him and he’s no more than arm’s distance away, so her hand falls on his arm and she grips the fabric and then realizes what she’s done and lets out a strangled kind of half-laugh, half-sob.

She’s truly sobbing now, in violent heaves, and she can barely get the words out. “I’m a disaster and you shouldn’t love me.” She thinks he smiles, maybe, though she can’t see properly through the tears.

“Too late.”

* * *

He holds her, just feeling her warmth, until her sobs quiet into little hiccups. And when she looks in his eyes and pulls him down so his mouth meets hers, there’s no urgency. They have time.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for coming on this journey with me. I appreciate it more than I can say.


End file.
